All Googly-Eyed
Want to know one way you can increase compliance when the honor system is at play? Hang up a set of eyes. There was once a vendor who stocked office break rooms with pretzels. He'd leave the pretzels, along with a locked box, and then leave for the day. People were supposed to take a pretzel and put a dollar into the box. At the end of the day, he'd come back and collect the...
FDA Labels
Do you know how many calories you're supposed to consume in a day or, more importantly, how many calories you actually eat in an average day? Most people don't. We just try to eat the best food we can, keep portions small, and hope that our caloric expenditure outweighs our intake. FDA labels on food packaging are of little use to the average person. If you happen to be the type of person who likes...
We Need To Unlearn Powerlessness
I was having a conversation about local musicians with a (somewhat older) friend of mine. He was remarking about how talented a lot of street musicians are, and how he hoped that one day, the best of them would be discovered by a talent scout in the recording industry. "Why?" I asked him plainly. "So said record company can take a huge chunk of their earnings for themselves?" He clearly didn't like this set of...
What If You're Wrong?
We generally interpret that question as an assault on our egos. If someone asks us to consider even the possibility that we're wrong, either about an opinion or a proposed course of action, we get very defensive. It's very difficult to tell or suggest to another person that they're wrong. Chances are, you won't change their mind. If anything, you may end up having the opposite effect: the more defensive a person is acting, the...
In Love and War
The philosopher Thomas Hobbes believed that prior to modern civilization, back when all men were living in nature, they lived in what he called a "perpetual state of war". In his view, survival was the highest order of nature and the most efficient way for man to have done that, he felt, was to go around fighting all the time. His solution: create a massive police state that would keep people from fighting all the...
One Step Away From Money
If you're a panhandler, and you're asking people even for just 25 cents, you're going to have a very tough time getting people to give it to you. It's just a quarter...most people have at least one of those in their pocket or purse at any given time, and few of them would miss a quarter. But asking someone to give it to you is still an uphill battle. However, ask someone for a minute...
New Brand of Hard Drives
Have you ever bought a 500 Gigabyte external hard drive, only to discover that once you formatted it, it only had around 465 Gigabytes of actual space on it? That's not some freak accident. Hard drive manufacturers have long been taking advantage of a difference between two separate ways of calculating space on a hard drive. They use decimal powers of ten in their advertisements, but the binary powers of two in the actual space...
Sam's Club Windmills
There's a Sam's Club a couple of hours east of where I live that recently installed windmills on the light posts in the parking lot. People have been talking about this online...a lot. It's the kind of thing people tell their neighbors about. ("Did you see those new lights at Sam's Club...?") And that's what makes it such a great idea. Admittedly, part of the reason this works is due to where this particular Sam's...
It's All Wonderland
As she delves deeper and deeper into Wonderland, Alice remarks: "Curiouser and curiouser..." Given a reality she didn't fully understand, under circumstances that were somewhat confusing, she started paying attention to the world around her. I drive my car a few times a week, but I've long since stopped wondering what's happening beneath the hood. I take it for granted that there's a complex machine at work, right in my own hands. I don't need...
Solving Problems
I imagine there was a time when a credit card was a great thing. Back when you had to carry around gobs of cash just to make sure you had enough to cover any expenses you might incur, it would have been nice to suddenly have a thin piece of plastic that would serve the purpose just as well. This predates me, so I can only guess at the frustration felt by millions of people...